ANTECEDENT COMPENDIUM is a journey to pristine emotions of a poet. This book of poetry is a random assortment, free of any connection between the individual poems. Each poem speaks of the struggles as well as accomplishments in the cycles of life. Dark, light and romantic verses. It is a compilation of effortless poetry written from heart and penned in black and white.
This work is the continuation of a sustained inquiry into moving pictures, conducting with an awareness of their prominence and prevalence in the contemporary world. A major indicator of the ubiquity of motion pictures is noticed by world travelers, who see the traces of their universality with the satellites on nomadic yurts in Asia and TV sets in remote and poor African villages. It is only now becoming realised that this mode of communication may well be the most pervasive, and perhaps even the most important, mass medium ever invented. With that background in mind, this book focuses on “cinematic knowing” as an expression of ludenic experience, important as a major source of “play-learning” in a world which is increasingly “wired” to the various forms of moving pictures. It investigates how this way of seeing has expanded our visual acuity and experience, including not only hindsight and foresight, but also insight and indeed even “blindsight”. It discusses the acquired abilities inherent in our “cinematic understandability”, the extent and depth of knowing that is learned from our life-long experience of exposure to motion pictures, including forms other than “the movies”, such as TV programming, commercials, and documentaries. It proceeds on the assumption that the most influential of this universe of visual expression is the one with the most important background and cultural impact, the motion picture show. This ludenic center of popular fare involved the creation of a heterocosm, a body of popular knowledge that accumulates and promulgates values and interests in visually identifiable formats, becoming in the process a kind of cultural enthymeme enjoyed for its expressive ability to reach people, and proved to be resilient and flexible in adapting to and addressing new circumstances.
Oedipal God offers the most comprehensive account in any language of the prodigal deity Nezha. Celebrated for over a millennium, Nezha is among the most formidable and enigmatic of all Chinese gods. In this theoretically informed study Meir Shahar recounts Nezha’s riveting tale—which culminates in suicide and attempted patricide—and uncovers hidden tensions in the Chinese family system. In deploying the Freudian hypothesis, Shahar does not imply the Chinese legend’s identity with the Greek story of Oedipus. For one, in Nezha’s story the erotic attraction to the mother is not explicitly acknowledged. More generally, Chinese oedipal tales differ from Freud’s Greek prototype by the high degree of repression that is applied to them. Shahar argues that, despite a disastrous father-son relationship, Confucian ethics require that the oedipal drive masquerade as filial piety in Nezha’s story, dictating that the child-god kill himself before trying to avenge himself upon his father. Combining impeccable scholarship with an eminently readable style, the book covers a vast terrain: It surveys the image of the endearing child-god across varied genres from oral and written fiction, through theater, cinema, and television serials, to Japanese manga cartoons. It combines literary analysis with Shahar’s own anthropological field work, providing a thorough ethnography of Nezha’s flourishing cult. Crossing the boundaries between China’s diverse religious traditions, it tracks the rebellious infant in the many ways he has been venerated by Buddhist monks, Daoist priests, and possessed spirit mediums, whose dramatic performances have served to negotiate individual, familial, and collective tensions. Finally, the book offers a detailed history of the legend and the cult reaching back over two thousand years to its origins in India, where Nezha began as a mythological being named Nalakūbara, whose sexual misadventures were celebrated in the Sanskrit epics as early as the first centuries BCE. Here Shahar reveals the long-term impact that Indian mythology has exerted—through the medium of esoteric Buddhism—upon the Chinese imagination of divinity. A tour de force of literary analysis, ethnographic research, psychological insight, and cross-cultural investigation, Oedipal God is a must read for anyone interested in Chinese studies and the historical connection between India and China. Shahar’s broad reach and engaging approach will appeal to specialists and students in a variety of disciplines including Chinese religion, Chinese literature, anthropology, Buddhist studies, psychology, Indian studies, and cross-cultural history.
Antecedents of Censuses From Medieval to Nation States, the first of two volumes, examines the influence of social formations on censuses from the medieval period through current times. The authors argue that relative influence of states and societies is probably not linear, but depends on the actual historical configuration of the states and societies, as well as the type of population information being collected. They show how information gathering is an outcome of the interaction between states and social forces, and how social resistance to censuses has frequently circumvented their planning, prevented their implementation, and influenced their accuracy.
